Background
Most US History books give a basic overview of the systematic mistreatment of American Indians from the times of colonization until “winning” of the American west. But, history books tend to stop there. My school’s history textbook and state standards only mention Native Americans 3 times for the entire course US History 1877 - Present. They have a shared standard with “treatment of immigrants and Natives” during both the Victorian era and early 20th Century and a shared standard with Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. There is no standard that explores the relationship between American Indians and African Americans, no explanation of how allotment and Jim Crow influenced the Native treatment of the Afro-Creeks and Freedmen, and no glimpse of the history behind the current standards of tribal citizenship that sometimes excludes those Freedmen. My students have no connection to how that textbook history applies to them. So, while teaching the standards is a goal, it is not the main goal of this unit. The main goal of this unit is to explore the relationship between African Americans and Creeks both historically and today so my students can connect with history and use those connections to further literacy and historical thinking skills.
Early Contact through the Civil War
A traditional Creek story tells of an early contact between the Creeks and Africans. The story is that a ship, filled with Africans, landed in the Gulf, near what is now Alabama. The Africans remained there and intermarried. This contact pre-dated Columbus and other explorers and is thus not verified.1 However, mainstream US history has verified that during Hernando De Soto’s exploration of the South, several Africans ended up staying with the Natives that were in the area and that the Africans were adopted into the tribe.2 Gary Zellar, in his work on African Creeks, says that the Africans had the potential to be accepted easier than whites because of two things. First, they were slaves and therefore mistreated by the same people, which could have created a bond. Second, as slaves taken from their homelands, they were without kin, meant that if adopted into the tribe they would have greater loyalty to the tribe. Unfortunately, the bonds were not as strong as they could have been because like the White conquistadores and later colonists, the Africans brought with them diseases and war, which probably undid any early goodwill.3
The next major step in the relation of the Creeks and African American came with the spread of slavery across the south. The influx of White settlers and their farms brought a lot of slaves to Indian Country. Up to this point, most American Indian tribes only used captives from battles as slaves in a limited capacity for short periods of time before returning some to their homeland or adopting them into their kin. Once a kinship clan adopted a slave into the bands, the slaves became that a full member of the clan. Chattel slavery was almost unknown until the English and Spanish brought enslaved Africans to the Americas.
The Creek and the whole Mississippian culture, which includes the Five Tribes, practiced an agricultural based society with crops providing the majority of the food for the people. Agriculture expanded with the introduction of plantation style farming from the new colonists. The Cherokees became the first and by far the most involved with plantation farming, but all the Five Tribes eventually began to keep slaves. The first Creek slaveholders were those who came with Scottish and English traders who stayed and married into the Creek kinship clans. The traders brought more and more slaves as they expanded their commercial farming and as generations of White-Creek owners kept slaves including Afro-Creek slaves.4 Like their White neighbors, some Creeks kept strict boundaries and separation between classes and enforced the rules with a heavy hand. Most, however, fell into the second class of slave owner who was less formal about separation, often lived in the same household, shared the household burdens of raising the children and did the work together.
In the early 1820s, a band of Creeks, often called the Lower-Creeks, moved from their homelands in Georgia and Alabama into Indian Territory. When the Creeks moved, they took not only everything they could carry, but also their slaves. Later, with the forced removal of the Creeks, the trails were filled with all the races and mixtures of people. Most of the Creeks had only a few slaves, but that changed when they arrived in Indian Territory. With plenty of land, and little other ways of making money, many Creeks, especially those families led by Mixed (White and Indian) blood found large scale farming and even plantations as the way to survive and thrive. Interestingly enough, some families ended up enslaving African-Creeks to whom they were related. Claudio Saunt speaks of this complexity with his work Black, White an Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. The Grayson family exemplifies the origins and resulting tensions of the mixing of the three races: European Whites, African American Blacks and Native American Indians.
Sometime in the late 1700s, Robert Grierson (later Grayson) had children with a Creek woman named Sinnugee. They had seven children. It was the youngest daughter who surprised the whole family by marrying an unnamed man of African descent. After having two children with him, Katy then left that marriage and married a second time to another Mixed-blood Creek, Tulwa Tustanagee. Tulwa and Katy’s children and grandchildren became leaders in the Creek Nation, both before and after removal to Indian Territory. William Grayson, Katy’s older brother also married an African American, Judah who was a former slave of his father’s. However, unlike Katy, William did not abandon his wife. Their children would have a hard life as mixed Black Creeks, even though they shared a common ancestor with White Creek leaders. The contrast between the children of William and Katy became more pronounced once they moved to Indian Territory. Saunt says “This is an American Indian story, but it is an American story too. They lived in areas … that are rarely included in American histories. They took extraordinary actions - rejecting their children, enslaving their relatives, and marrying their masters.”5 Katy’s older children married African Americans, and their children became slaves of their cousins.
The Civil War is famous for pitting brother against brother and splitting families. It was no different in Indian Territory, especially with the Creek Indians. With a few exceptions, the Full-blood Creeks in the northern part of the Territory sided with the Union, and the southern, mostly Mixed-blood Creeks, signed loyalty agreements with the Confederacy early in the secession and war. Many slaves from the Southern Creeks escaped and headed north to Kansas where they joined Northern Creeks under Opothleyahola. The majority also joined either the First Kansas Colored Infantry or the Indian Home Guards. The history of the Indian Home Guards is very interesting in particular because of it was made up of Whites, Blacks and Natives. The Southern Creeks, in contrast, joined Confederate forces based around the Red River, mostly Texan. Like Northern Creeks, Afro- Creeks, both slave and free, served as interpreters on both sides. The pivotal battle in Indian Territory, the Battle of Honey Springs, had Black, White, and Native against Black, White and Native. When I teach a US History survey class or Oklahoma History, I will use the Indian Home Guards and the First Kansas Colored Infantry as glimpses of integration and the African American contributions to American history.
Reconstruction and Allotment
During Reconstruction, Afro-Creek relations changed again. The 1866 treaty with the Creeks required former slaves or Freedmen to be admitted to tribal citizenship regardless of any blood quantum. The result was that in several tribes, including the Creeks, the former slaves either came close or completely out-numbered those who were Full-blood or Mixed-blood. G.W. Stidham, a Creek leader in in the 1860s asserted that the African Creeks would hold the balance of power within 10 years because of increasing population.6 He also claimed that the African Creeks caused the Green Peach War “saying that their insistent demands were the center of the controversy.”7 To the Creeks, it became a matter of Creek sovereignty as well as racial differentiation.
The same matter of sovereignty verses racial discrimination is at the heart the current debates that all the Five Tribes being held even today.8 The differences between Freedmen, Afro-Creeks, White Creeks and White intermarried started with reconstruction and the Dunn Roll.
In 1867, Indian Agent James Dunn took a roll of Creek citizens in order to distribute a $200,000 treaty stipulation. At the time, he did not include Freedmen, but it did include Black Creeks such as Judah Grayson (William’s wife who was his father’s slave before they were married) and her children9. The Freedmen protested and with the help of Northern (Full-blood) Creeks appealed to the US Congress. Southern Creeks pushed back on Congress saying that the Creek Council had to approve this order by Congress.10 Congress responded to this defiance by suspending all annuities until the ex-slaves received their share. Dunn quickly finished the Freedman’s Roll and payments were made to almost 1800 former slaves.11 The arbitrary nature of the Dunn roll set the tone for the later allotment process and the subsequent citizenship processes.
Allotment in severalty is when lands (tribal lands) are taken from the community, and plots are given to individual members. In most cases allotment caused the dissolution of the tribal governments. Basically, under the traditional tribal community laws, everyone owned the land, but it belonged to the one who worked it. If you farmed or ranched on the land, it was yours. Once you stopped working it, the land reverted back to the tribe. Tribes owned vast tracts of land, a great deal of which natives allowed to sit unfarmed. To White and Black immigrants to the area, this was probably seen as wasteful. As in other parts of the nation, settlers demanded land. Allotment became the policy by which the government broke former treaties and took the land. Taking all the land, and then giving portions, even a generous portion, to individual citizens would mean only a part of the land would be allotted. The government could take the rest of the land and give it to settlers in land runs or open settlement. Allotment was authorized for Creek land in by Congress in 1887.
Allotment became a defining event for Afro-Creek relations especially because allotment directly affected sovereignty. Sovereignty has a lot of definitions, but for practical purposes in this unit, it is the ability of the tribe to control itself. Many of the historians of the allotment process in Oklahoma use the concept of tribal sovereignty at the turn of the century interchangeably with the idea of self-determination as it is used for tribal governments starting in the 1970s.12 Many Creeks knew that allotment represented a threat to tribal sovereignty and resisted for as long as they could.13
In order to allot lands, the government had to develop a definitive list of tribal members. This list was to be put together not by the tribes themselves but by a commission, the Dawes Commission. The first Dawes Commission formed by the General Allotment Act did not apply to any of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory. Congress corrected that with the Curtis Act of 1891 and 1898 that amended the Dawes Act to apply allotment to Indian Territory plus abolished tribal governments and dissolved tribal courts. The Dawes Commission (1891) was supposed to use lists from the tribes, but after a couple of years resistance, especially from the Creeks, they sought government approval to override tribal lists and input. They were granted this approval with the Second Curtis Act, 1898. Despite all the tribal resistance, in July 1898, the first day enrollment was open, more than 500 Creeks showed up in Okmulgee to enroll. Why would the Creeks do this? The answer comes from the other part of the Dawes focus; the individual members picked their 160 acres, and registered the land. While most stayed near to their traditional homesteads, a few sought better lands.14 This system favored those who could afford to travel, afford to miss time away from work to stand in line and those who had large families. Each individual received the 160 acres, so a larger family meant more land. Some felt that this favored the large Afro-Creek families over the smaller White Mixed-blood. But in truth, most of the Mixed-blood families found ways around this by taking charge of the lands their former slaves were allotted or by other means.15
The Creeks also protested the Dawes rolls because it did seem to have clear established guidelines, depended on word of mouth and was probably subject to corruption. Over the years between the Reconstruction Treaties and the Dawes Commission, Black and White immigrants flooded Indian Territory. Many married into the tribes and claimed inheritance. Also, the Black non-natives either squatted or worked as tenant farmers to the landholding tribal members and would try to claim membership for their children.
New Black immigrants, (called Statehood blacks by the African Creeks) were at first very culturally distinct from the African Creeks. Afro-Creeks and Statehood Blacks did not get along together and often made complaints to the Territorial government against each other.16 Later, as the Dawes Commission enforced strict categories, the Afro-Creek, Creek Freedmen and Statehood Blacks grouped together, and formed towns as economic associations designed to help them progress in both land-ownership and political power. Some Freedmen from other tribes also came to live in all black towns such as Boley, Grayson, and Clearview. Any lingering distinctions quickly went away with the spread of Jim Crow. The very first law passed after Oklahoma became a state was a segregation bill for all forms of public transportation. The government was not hesitant to pass more and more Jim Crow laws that quickly disenfranchised all blacks in the states, including African Natives. The state divided races into “White or Negro” – with Native Americans without African blood being put in the White category and anyone with even a drop of African-American blood being listed as Negro.
Scholars such as David Chang, Gary Zellar, and Claudio Saunt agree that the death knell to the recognized status of Afro-Creeks came from the Dawes Roll.17 To the Dawes Commission it did not matter if they were African Creeks (mixed blood) or Freedmen with no Creek blood. Many families were divided by the strict categories of “Creek Freedmen” or “Creek by Blood”. One only has to search the Dawes Roll by the last name of certain families to see this. The Grayson surname returns more than 400 names, at least 275 of which are listed as Creek Freedmen. The 275 includes direct descendants of William Grayson and Judah, and his younger sister Katy Grayson (the two who had children with African Americans).18 The Dawes Commission followed the prevailing custom that a “drop of African blood made that person a Negro,”19 no matter what the Creek definition was.
The Creeks, no longer a sovereign nation because of the Dawes Act, followed the strict categories of the Dunn and Dawes Rolls. Of course, there were exceptions to the rule, especially for those who had money or influence or who could hide their ancestors behind false family histories. The arbitrary imposition of “White or Black” to Creeks conflicted with tribal customs or rules, but it became and still is important to Creek sovereignty and their ability to decide citizenship rights. Many people across the United States, especially in Oklahoma, who claim to be Native American, do not understand that the combination of the Dawes Rolls and early statehood restrictions on race established racial and enrollment practices that remain in place today.
Rebuilding and Oklahoma’s “All-Black” Towns
The tensions between the Creek Nation and its Freedmen continued to grow especially as Native Americans across the country continued to fight for sovereignty. For the Creeks, this sovereignty question was decidedly housed in the question of who were members of the tribe and therefore who had rights to receive any benefits given. Understanding the historical developments of US and Indian relations during this time period helps us further explore this topic.
In 1926, Hubert Work, the Secretary of the Interior of the U.S., requested a report of the true situation of the American Indian. The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored the report, officially called The Problem with Indian Administration. Because the investigating group was led by Lewis Meriam, most historians refer to it as the Meriam report. The commission spent 7 months interviewing Indians in 23 states, including a large percentage in Oklahoma. They looked at the health, education, economic and social situations of Native Americans. The resulting 847 pages detailed the Indian problem and squarely laid blame on the process of allotment especially for the breakdown in government and economy. The report said that high infant mortality, poor nutrition, and even high crime were directly tied to those breakdowns in governance and economic opportunities.20
The US Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. The act gave reservation tribes the ability to reorganize and begin to regain reservation lands. However, Oklahoma tribes, including the Creeks were not reservation Indians, and therefore the act did not cover them. Newly elected Oklahoma Senator Elmer Thomas and his House counterpart Representative Will Rogers (not the comedian) co-sponsored bills in the House and Senate to address this oversight. The resulting bill passed by Congress became known as the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936. The act gave “tribal associations” the ability to reform, gave tribes impetus to regain land lost in allotment and though business deals, and gave encouragement in the promotion of Native culture. Oddly enough, the Creek Nation did not formally apply to reorganize as a nation, but rather small bands and townships applied for Federal recognition. Several groups applied based on tribal standing, but the Muscogee Creeks did not.
The all-Black towns, full of Freedmen and Afro-Creeks, also did not apply for federal recognition perhaps thinking that they would not be granted rights based on race and secondary social status. Nonetheless, at their high point in the 1920s, 50 all-black towns spread out across Oklahoma, almost all of which started as Afro-Indian, or Freedmen towns. Currently only 13 are still incorporated in Oklahoma, all but one of which (Langston) was originally Indian. Ironically, Langston is the most successful town of those 13 still in existence mostly because it became home to a traditional all-Black college. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl spelled the end of most of the all-Black towns. With limited resources being reserved to Whites and Indians (considered White by the state government), many African Americans, whether Afro-Indian or not, did not have a chance to succeed.
The Indian Reorganization Act and the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act helped to launch the “Indian New Deal”. While Oklahoma benefited from the actions of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, it did little to help African American communities. It also had little to do with the state of Native Americans. “The New Deal left the conditions of the tribes of Oklahoma basically unchanged.21” The WPA did, however, play an important role the documentation of the history of the tribes that formed Indian Territory and the state the Oklahoma. Much of this history is written in the summaries of the interviews that make up the Indian Pioneer Papers.
Current Controversies
I wanted to take time to continue the history of the Muscogee Creek Nation, but time and space limits prohibit it. However, in the school year, I will continue on with a history of the Termination Policies (Public Law 280, 1953) of the Cold War era, and with the general reluctance of the Governor of Oklahoma, William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray to officially disband the Five Tribes and assume full jurisdiction. Because termination was not applicable to the Five Tribes in general and to the Creeks in particular (see Harjo vs Kleppe, 1976), the nations did not have to seek federal reorganization. This meant that in 1979, when the Creeks rewrote their constitution, the federal government accepted it.
The Muscogee Constitution clearly sets citizenship rights on the Dawes Roll. A person must show direct descent line from a person listed on the Dawes Roll as “Creek by Blood” and not as Freedmen. This means that the flawed roll, which assigned oversimplified categories of Creek by Blood or Freedmen, carries that flawed categorization to modern times. The Cherokee Nation passed similar citizenship bylaws to their constitution. Both tribes are still being sued by people excluded by these rules, in particular by Freedmen who had blood quantum and were treated as members of the tribes before the federal government appeared imposed new racial practices.
Understanding the history of African American and Indian affairs should help my students see why so many who identify as Native, or have Native family stories do not have CDIB or tribal membership. Hopefully, this understanding will help foster connections between my students and the history that is still being decided today.
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